For reasons mud-clear to me, there exists a subculture of … entities that record themselves opening one or more packs of CCG boosters and upload the result to YouTube. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh are the most common, of course, but it doesn’t stop there. There are over 35,000 such videos on YouTube.

The following video has over 33,000 views, for example:

Some have over 150,000 views. Someone want to explain this me?

6 Comments

1) People in countries where a particular expansion has not launched might be interested in seeing the new cards.
2) Vicarious pleasure might be gained from seeing someone open a booster. Since it is fun to open boosters of your own, you might enjoy a vicarious thrill from watching someone else open one (especially if it contained a particular rare card)
3) People might be drawn to the video out of head-scratching curiosity, as presumably you were! :)

It’s actually for the sake of figuring out print runs. Every box can be “mapped” in such a way that you could open a box and figure out where the “good” rares are to keep, then use the “bad” packs for drafting or something more evil. There is a chain of thought that buying boosters from an online retailer is basically buying from their possible stash of “bad boosters” using this technique.

Looks like “geek porn” to me… but I’d go with the “mapping the good boosters” explanation. :)
I remember than someone in the past find a way to count the cards in the box of a trading cards collection to track down the boosters with the “ultra-rare” cards, open them and sell the card at a very high price.

Also, new cards smell good. I think it’s the card stock rather than the ink: when you open a pack for the first time there is a strong new card smell.

It’s funny because I don’t like new car smell but I love new card smell.

Also, if you haven’t gotten any of that release yet, or you did but it seemed like it was a bad batch, you want to see others videos of new cards to see if you were just unlucky or if it truly is a bad set.